China and Linux: A Lesson in Industry Transformation

Organizations around the globe are increasingly developing new applications for big data, mobile and cloud, not to mention the increasing creation and use of social tools, within major markets like banking, communications, retail, transportation and finance. These new applications are also fundamental to operating in a connected world where sensors, data centers, smartphones and even cars are now all connected in a large ecosystem.

This influx of development has created a need for powerful infrastructure and processing speeds along with an ever increasing agility only possible through open source tools and operating systems, in an effort to further connect, collaborate and innovate on a global scale.

Of course, Linux has been the foundation of much of this disruption – and the operating system is becoming more popular across global growth markets. Worldwide enterprise adoption of Linux continues to rise, according to the Linux Foundation’s2013 Enterprise End User Report. Enterprises are looking to Linux to more quickly run cloud computing, big data analysis and mobile applications or workloads, and this move to Linux is growing at a consistent rate year-over-year, set to reach 73 percent by the end of 2013.

One country in particular that has increased its use of Linux is China. In fact, according to a recent IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker (Q4 2012), Linux growth in China surpasses the global average, going from 9.2 percent to 33.2 percent in server market, over the past 10 years.

Meanwhile, a shift is occurring among enterprise users of Linux in China, Africa, and central Europe with increasing demand for more pre-integrated servers and software; that is, hardware and software that come integrated from the factory. Until now, Linux momentum has largely been occurring on commodity hardware where users do the integration themselves. But few companies can afford to do spend precious time and resource gearing up systems to do big data, cloud, mobile and social computing.

That’s why IBM, in collaboration with Red Hat and SUSE, just unveiled its first Power Systems Linux Center in China. The movement towards pre-integrated systems and robust development on Linux is only going to continue to rapidly grow around the world, as organizations seek higher utilization, better resiliency and stronger security as they leverage new computing abilities.

China has a unique set of enterprise computing challenges with massive changes underway in their financial services, transportation, retail and communications industries. As Linux continues to advance in the country, we’ll see potential for new open source innovations that can be replicated around the world.